Teabag Etiquette

Truly the lives of conservatards are rich with embellished detail and baroque fantasy. Yesterday literally dozens of them across the country took a well-earned break from seeing Plunger/Palin images in their oil stains and toaster strudels, in order to schlep on down to their nearest body of water and throw tea into it. Perhaps re-enacting the Battle of Bunker Hill would have required too much physical exertion. Take that, Black Socialist Hitler!

Now, it's odd, isn't it, that they all spontaneously arrived at this little novelty act, supposedly spurred on by the supposedly spontaneous stock-exchange rant of one self-righteous CNBC hack.

Or not:

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.”

....

“Within hours of Santelli’s rant, a website called ChicagoTeaParty.com sprang to life. Essentially inactive until that day, it now featured a YouTube video of Santelli’s “tea party” rant and billed itself as the official home of the Chicago Tea Party. The domain was registered in August, 2008 by Zack Christenson, a dweeby Twitter Republican and producer for a popular Chicago rightwing radio host Milt Rosenberg—a familiar name to Obama campaign people.

Not that CNBC has any credibility higher than putting some money bunnies in the anchor seat whenever possible, but they also continue to employ Jim Cramer. Now they can add wingnut water-carrying to their estimable traits. Nicely done, folks. Can't wait to see what cool grassroots effort Faux News might spontaneously stir 'mongst the freeptards, maybe a bailout Easter egg roll on Milt Rosenberg's back lawn.

These people are impossible to parody anymore. At least the Bush Derangement Syndrome the kids kept babbling about took longer than a fuckin' month to spread.